Bear harvest drops 41 percent from last year

Several factors caused a drop in the number of bears killed in this year's six-day bear hunt, wildlife officials said.

"Even with the decline in the harvest, we had a successful, safe hunt, with no accidents or injuries related to the bear hunt," said Larry Herrighty, assistant director of the state Division of Fish and Wildlife.

Reasons for the lower number of bears taken, Herrighty said, include the weather, fewer hunters in the woods, fewer bears and a weak mast crop which caused many more bears to find winter dens.

"Each hunt is different," Herrighty said. "You can't control the weather, you can't control the acorn crop."

As long as there is readily available food, bears in this region will remain active until deep into the winter, said wildlife biologist Leonard Walgast. But this year, with a sparse acorn crop, many bears denned up early and slept through the hunt.

This year's harvest totaled 287 bears, a 41 percent drop from the 469 bears taken in 2011 and about half the 592 bears harvested in 2010, the first hunt after a five-year layoff.

In the two other hunts this century, 328 bears were taken in 2003 and 298 bears were killed in 2005.

Walgast, who wrote the state's current Black Bear Management Plan when he was a member of the Fish and Game Council, said the numbers drop is "not too unreasonable, considering there was virtually no mast and bears were denning, a lot fewer hunters and bears got a lot smarter."

The management plan, which allowed the 2010 hunt, was approved by the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection with a nod from Gov. Chris Christie and state court approval and called for five years of a hunt to coincide with the six-day shotgun buck season, annually the state's biggest hunt.

The 2013 bear/buck season will run from Dec. 2-7.

This year about 6,600 permits were issued to hunters, about 1,000 fewer permits than last year, Herrighty said. In past hunts, the average success rate was 5-8 percent.

The 2012 success rate was 4.4 percent, Herrighty said and when compared with the

success rate of 2-3 percent for Pennsylvania and New York, "it shows we still have a lot of bears in the woods.

On opening day of the hunt, Division of Fish and Wildlife Director Dave Chanda said the original goal of the hunts was to reduce the bear population to about 800 bruins in the 1,000 or so square miles of northwestern New Jersey where the population, at the start of the 2010 hunt, was estimated to be about 3,400.

However, with education and "a public becoming more aware of how to live with bears, we believe that number can go up some," he said.

He said the expected population of bears should be about one bear per every three square miles, such as in New York and Pennsylvania.

At the start of the 2010 hunt, the New Jersey population was at three bears for every one square mile.

At the start of the 2012 hunt, the bear population in the area west of Interstate 287 and north of Interstate 80, was estimated to be about 2,800 bears, of which about 10 percent have been handled by wildlife technicians or biologists in the past year, either because they were captured as part of a scientific study or were captured at a site of nuisance bear complaints.

Chanda said that with public education and awareness, that ratio might be settled at one bear per one square mile.

Walgast said two ways of looking at wildlife capacity are the biological carrying capacity and the cultural carrying capacity.

"Bears are never going to go hungry in New Jersey," he said, so the biological capacity will never be reached. However, the amount of interaction which humans will tolerate -- the cultural capacity -- is different.

"That's the capacity we have to worry about," said Walgast, who holds a doctorate in wildlife biology and specialized in black bears.

"While we are changing human behavior when it comes to bears, hunting will also change the bears' behavior," he said.

Bears will begin to associate humans with being hunted, he explained and that association should be enough to offset the bruins association of humans to food.

"With all wildlife species, danger drives them more than food. Every wildlife species' main goal is to survive," Walgast said.

Herrighty said about 300 bears were tagged in the past year and 260 were known to be alive at the start of the hunt. About 10 percent of those 260 bears were killed during the hunt.

He said biologists who have used radio/GPS collars to keep track of several bears, reported most of those animals had settled into winter dens about two weeks ago.

"We think that indicates many more bears were denned up early because there was nothing out there to eat," he said.

But that doesn't mean all bears went to bed hungry.

On Monday, the black bear unit was called to the city of Glen Rock in Bergen County, where they captured a 235-pound female and relocated her. The bear had been previously tagged by biologists and, from injuries on her body such as bruises, was likely hit by a car within the past month.

"She was out and active, probably because she had a good food source," Herrighty said.

While two of three bears killed in this year's hunt were taken in Sussex County, the two largest bears were harvested in Warren County. A bear which weighed 702 pounds "live" weight, was checked in at the Pequest Wildlife Management Area while a 586-pound field-dressed bear, shot in Frelinghuysen, was checked in at the Whittingham WMA station.